Friday, 19 October 2012

Thou hermit haunter of the lonely glen And common wild and heath -- the desolate face Of rude waste landscapes far away from men
Where frequent quarrys give thee dwelling place
With strangest taste and labour undeterred Drilling small holes along the quarrys side More like the haunts of vermin than a bird And seldom by the nesting boy descried Ive seen thee far away from all thy tribe
Flirting about the unfrequented sky And felt a feeling that I cant describe Of lone seclusion and a hermit joy To see thee circle round nor go beyond That lone heath and its melancholly pond

John Clare: Sand Martin, written between 1824 and 1832, first published 1935

Adult
Sand Martin (Riparia riparia) at nest site on Baltic Sea cliff in
Dziówek, Poland. The two burrow entrances open into a nest cavity built at the end of a tunnel about 60 cm deep: photo by Eidzej, 11 July 2006

Colony of Sand Martins (Riparia riparia) nesting on the side of a cliff, Turkish Kurdistan: photo by Dûrzan Cîrano, 5 June 2010

Nest of Sand Martin (Riparia riparia), with egg. The nest is built in a burrow dug into the sand, which the male or female access through a corridor extended to about 50-60 cm depth (when the sand layer is deep enough): photo by Axel Strauss, 6 July 2006

17 comments:

Clare, who looked so closely at everything in the landscape about him, didn't need a birder's guidebook to get at the essence of the curiosity of the particular behavioural habits of these wonderful little birds.

Where frequent quarrys give thee dwelling placeWith strangest taste and labour undeterredDrilling small holes along the quarrys sideMore like the haunts of vermin than a bird

(Their ability to make happy use of power transmission lines, as seen in the bottom photo here from the Ukraine, and in the video from St. Ives, suggests that perhaps there is a purpose to be found by some living being for everything manufactured by Industrious Man -- though of course IM had no such purpose in mind.)

Yes, beautiful. I love looking at birds. They do decide where to live and that's it--like in our gutters and one year, right over our mailbox. No matter how many times you try to convince them to try another spot . . .

I can't get enough of watching these little guys. Here's a colony of Swedish Sand Martins popping in and out of their holes (do they really know whose is whose?), working on burrowing, scrabbling about and generally making it seem that being a Sand Martin would be a wonderful thing:

(I understand that the nest burrows contain only a single egg apiece, and are abandoned after hatching, due to the incursions of vermin -- making Clare's observation about the "haunts" perhaps more accurate than he might have known.)

(Oh, and my bad for mispelling the name of that Yorkshire stream. It's the River Aire -- presided over in the greater scheme of things by, of course, the interdependent Natural Departments of Air and Water.)

One can hardly imagine that the beauty of these photographs could be equaled by the mere words of a single man but here we have it - the opposite is true - the photographs, gorgeous as they are, struggle to match this amazing man, John Clare, whose immediate intuitive feeling for these little beings makes one feel that he, too, is something of the flitting martin, "in lone seclusion and a hermit joy ..." Beautiful, Tom.

Thanks for the alert reading, sensitive and as always going straight to the heart of the matter.

I think that sense of identification of the observing poet (is he "the nesting boy" I wonder?) with the bird here is real and palpable. He is so accustomed to feeling singular and alone, it seems he transfers -- in fact for a moment almost imposes -- that lonesome singularity "Of lone seclusion and a hermit joy" upon the Sand Martin (though as he can't have helped but notice, these are the most sociable of birds, happy in their busy colonies).

I don't think it's the dread "pathetic fallacy" at work, so much as a kind of purposive empathy (as you suggest), an in-feeling ("immediate intuitive feeling," as you so nicely put it) that he finds indescribable because it is beyond description. And too he appears to have seen some member(s) of the colony split off from the group, and climb up into "the unfrequented sky" -- free as a bird, like they say.